January 5, 2018 AT 5:00 pm

How To Build a Raspberry Pi Rubiks Cube Solving Robot #Raspberrypi

The BricKuber is an open source Rubik’s cube solving robot you can build yourself.

We wanted to build a Rubiks cube solving robot with the Raspberry Pi. Rather than go for speed, we went with simplicity: if you have a Raspberry Pi, a BrickPi kit, and a standard LEGO Mindstorms EV3 or NXT Kit, you should be able to easily follow in our footsteps.

The Rubik’s cube has recently begun making a comeback. Invented in 1974, it is the world’s best-selling toy. But solving them takes thought, effort, and skill . . . so why not let a robot do it? In this project, we take a Raspberry Pi, a BrickPi, and a set of LEGO Mindstorms and build a Rubik’s cube solving robot. Simply place an unsolved Rubik’s cube in the solver, run the python program, and your Rubik’s cube is solved!

The project uses the Pi to directly solve the Rubik’s cube. The BrickPi3 takes the unsolved Rubik’s cube and the Raspberry Pi takes a picture of each side of the Rubik’s cube with the Raspberry Pi Camera. The Pi creates a text map of the color squares that shows where they are located on the cube. When it has fully mapped the cube, the Pi uses the “kociemba” python library to map out the moves needed to solve the Rubik’s cube. This information is taken by the Pi and BrickPi3 to solve the Rubik’s cube using the LEGO motors. The result: a solved Rubik’s cube.

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